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Television Media

New Episodes Of Battlestar Galactica? 127

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-still-have-nightmares-about-that-bear-thing dept.
sawilson writes "I was surfing over at scifi.com and noticed a link to a story called ' New 'Galactica' To Look Ahead'. I loved this show, and never missed an episode." I liked this show when I was little, but recently watched a marathon of it, and was pretty disappointed. (I'd like to see a marathon of Buck Rogers and see if (A) It was as cool as my childhood wants me to think it was and (B) If Erin Grey was as hot as I remember). The new Galactica is tied to Bryan "X-Men and The Usual Suspects" Singer, so it certainly has potential.
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New Episodes Of Battlestar Galactica? More

New Episodes Of Battlestar Galactica?

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  • Buck Rogers... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (I'd like to see a marathon of Buck Rogers and see if (A) It was as cool as my childhood wants me to think it was and (B) If Erin Grey was as hot as I remember).


    A) Probably not.

    B) Probably.

  • twinky, the robot, who always said bee-dee-bee-dee-bee-dee

    Wasn't that Twiki [buck-rogers.com], from Buck Rogers?

    -dair
  • Could someone please explain the premise behind Space 1999? Like are they from earth? Is there some sort of earth empire or what not?

    Humans had colonised the moon, and were preparing to launch a mission in to deep space. Something went wrong prior to liftoff that caused a massive explosion, and the moon got thrown out of orbit.

    You might think an explosion that big would blow the moon into pieces, but I guess not. So the moon drifted off through space, luckily running into a different set of aliens each week.

    -dair
  • Interesting you found the mythology as Greek. As I don't know which particular parts you are refering to this is a good time to insert a Orson Scott Card is a mormon thread.

    Only this time its Glen A. Larson. Although I can't say what his religious affiliations are for sure having been raised in Mormon culture I can say there are strong simularities. My older brothers even told us (and I've learned better than to trust what they told us back then) that he was.

    From the episode where the bee people lure in humans with drinking and gambling and then become food for the queen, to the Patrick McNee as the Prince of Darkness (can anyone remember the direct quote of Orson Pratt (maybe John Taylor) in that episode?) Heck even the 13 lost tribes and the council of the twelve were familiar mythologies.

    Ever find it odd that Boltar (a human) was in charge of the robots that hated humans? I wonder too, its very much like a plot twist found in the Book of Alma where one of the Nephites joins the Lamanites only to become their King and send them on an extermination of his former nation. This isn't particularly Mormon however, since I am reminded that George Lucas also used the same plot twist for Darth Vader. Who won the lawsuit on that copyright infringement anyway?

    Anyway, my point isn't to claim Mormon credit for BG. Simply put my point is that it is interesting that one person saw such forced mythology as being Greek and another found it as his own (George Lucas.)
  • Dude, any adult woman that you've seen on a screen when you were a child could (at least almost) have been your mom. She might have been hot back then; do you care if she's hot for someone your age right now? Would be quite exceptional if she were. Of course, I'm not implying anything about your sexual preferences...

    --
  • Worse yet, the Moon in Space: 1999 wasn't cracked in half. Which, as we all know happened to it in 1994 because of a runaway planet passing between the Earth and the Moon. :)
  • Richard Hatch has been campaigning for a new Battlestar Galactica for years, making the rounds of several SF cons (like Dragoncon in Atlanta) to raise support and money, and to report his progress to fans.

    Now someone else comes along and says, "Gee, we like this idea. Let's make our own version of BG and cut out Hatch and the other original actors."

    You should know Richard Hatch has worked long and hard for a new series, including producing a really slick trailer for the show with modern CGI at his own expense. Now he is being repaid with the shaft.
  • bring back mr. bennedict!
  • Why can't they bring back good shows like BJ and the bear. There's a concepts I can't get enough of, a man and his monkey.
  • "It was produced as a kneejerk reaction to Star Trek showing on the other networks..."

    No, it was a reaction to the success of Star Wars. (Why can't they teach decent History in school?)

    And anyway, Star Trek was rerunning in syndication, mostly on UHF channels, not on "other networks". Maybe you meant "channels"?
  • Check this: http://www.horizon.org.uk/movie/

    This was Sci-Fi for grown ups (although I think it is now classified as Erotic ?).

    Forget about daggit; Orac, Zen and Slave ruled.
  • I remember seeing a documentary in the last year about Battlestar Galictica that mentioned that the fellow who played Commander Apollo had started shooting a sequel to it but was stopped by some obnoxious copyright claims by one of the original producers. The documentary did show some of a trailer for the new movie and that piece of the trailer was literally Star Wars level. It was incredible.

  • Cylon! (Score:1)

    by Pope ( 17780 )
    Dude, it's the Cylon who were the enemies of the Galactica fleet.

    The Space channel here in Canada started playing the series last year and I was glued to the TV every Saturday at 6 to watch it again. Like a lot of shows with limited budgets, a lot of it hasn't aged gracefully, but inbetween the cheese there was some great ideas.

    Besides, getting to see John Colicos [imdb.com] (RIP) as yet another bad guy just makes me smile.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • You mustn't have been paying very close attention when watching all those shows: it was called "Galactica 1980" when they found Earth, because that's the year it aired.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • It almost sounds like they are continuing from where the main series left off and don't consider Galactica 1989 when they found earth. Anyone remember that one?

    I went to see the original movie in the theaters, then watched every episode (incl. Galactica 1989) on TV. Oh and yes, Buck Rogers (Erin grey was hot) and a couple other shows.

  • Space: Above and Beyond was not shite, I would have to argue. I have a hard time seeing Melrose space... Its not as if the characters are trying to get it on constantly, or attempting to back stab every 5 min. Hell, that name is probably only used by people who've seen it once and feel like discounted because it was made by those silly americans or some such stuff. The plot had a good many more plot lines it could have taken if Fox would have let it go on longer. The only thing that took away was the Red Shirt syndrome where there were new members of the 58th each week and they were dead by the end of the episode. The final ep broke this trend so at least they were aware of it. Space: Above and Beyond was excellent and would have only gotten better with time.
  • It always came out of my mouth as
    "Battlestar Ponderosa" for some reason.

  • She was (Score:1)

    by X-Nc ( 34250 )
    > (B) If Erin Grey was as hot as I remember

    And she still is, even with the 70's hair and funky costumes.

    ---

  • Laserbeam from the left, left, left, BLAM. Laserbeam from the right, right, right, BLAM.

    Etc. Etc. Ad nauseating.

    I just love the way they used one episode's worth of special effects footage over the entire series.I wonder if they'll reuse the 70s footage to save money? Sci-Fi recently ran a marathon of it but they added MST3K type captions to the bottom of the screen. It made the stinkbombs a lot of fun. For instance, Starbuck and Apollo are sitting around playing cards and smoking and the caption at the bottom says: "The Surgeon General Warning:Smoking is hazardous to your health."

    I have hunch that the new series will just be more of the same old felgercarb.

  • You can see the real Dagit (i.e. the "man" behind the costume) here [battlestarfanclub.com].

    By the way, I had the good fortune to see Erin Gray up-close and in-person at a sci-fi convention in Sprinfield, MO, just last weekend. She not only was she as hot as you remember in the show, she still looks pretty damned hot to me! She has aged _very_ well.

    <Insert witty .sig here>

  • hopefully no one else will pick it up

    There is probably nobody here who wants to pick up either the midg^H^H^H^Hvertically-challenged actor in the Twiki suit or the chimpanze in the daggit suit.

  • Hot enough to be Ten of Nine. Possibly twelve.

  • I think it's safe to say you can't do Battlestar Galactica without Cylons," he said. "But what our relationship to the Cylons will be, I can't say."

    I think we will learn that Lorne Green was captured by the Cylons and kept alive for years with Cylon implants until he was finally rescued by the Galactica heroes. He is now recuperating in his vinyard in France... er, I mean at his cattle ranch in Montana.

    Meanwhile, the Cylons are having new troubles now that the good guys have discovered that they can temporarily disable the Cylons with supermarket bar code scanners. That and the usual phased tachyon pulse from the deflector...
  • tentacle monster that would pull you undernetath itself and then slide out a smoking, charred corpse

    Oh god yes, that had me awake for several days. I saw the episode a couple of years ago and although you could see the 'dolly' it still 0wned me.
  • tentacle monster that would pull you undernetath itself and then slide out a smoking, charred corpse

    Oh god yes, that had me awake for several days. I saw the episode a couple of years ago and although you could see the 'dolly' it still 0wned me.

    Ah, yes. According to some fansites I've seen, "Dragon's Domain" is widely considered one of the best eps of the series.
  • Wouldn't the Aibo be the descendent? I mean the Aibo came after the dagit bothi in terms of Galactica mythology and real life timeline.
  • Now there's some British SF shows that don't believe in glitz! ;P
  • The trailer had Lorne Greene in them? He died back in '87!
  • The thing about the original Galactica series... well, the execution of all but the first episode was poor, but IMHO the concepts are quite strong:
  • Actually they used the space combat footage from the movie, not a TV episode.
  • Starbuck smoked the cigars and got the girls.
  • Before you go spewing more boorish drivel, you should realize that some of us Americans actually like some of the imported Britsh television when we can find it on our TV. Dr. Who, albeit with the terribly cheesy special effects was a good show. Robot wars is a great show, as was Junkyard Wars (until they got rid of the Britsh Host). Who's Line is it Anyway was a good show, at least the Ameican version kept some of the same people.

    Now British comidies, they are total crap. Execpting of course Monty Phython.
  • You have to be kidding, that has to be the worst SF show ever! They didn't get anything right, terrible, terrible. Frankly its even worse than that Fox Space show with the chiggs or whatever the hell they called them. Jesus, man!
  • And if he does, will they still do this [battlestarfanclub.com]??
  • I had heard that rumor, too, but didn't know it was true until I saw a particular episode years after the series had been cancelled. I guess I was too young to catch it the first time around.

    Remember that big, glowing, crystal ship that swallowed up Starbuck or Apollo's fighter from time to time? In one episode, Starbuck asked one of the glowy beings in the crystal ship who they were. The being responded with something like "as you are now we once were, and as we are now you may become" - almost a verbatim quote from Church President Lorenzo Snow about the LDS belief that we humans have the potential to be like God. That clinched it for me. After that, I started seeing a lot of LDS doctrinal references.

    There's an interesting note on the topic in the kobol.com FAQ here [kobol.com].
  • I hope they bring back daggit the robot dog.
  • personally I'm glad that the sci-fi channel is doing things like this (dune again, galactica again) the one thign that sucks most about sci-fi shows is that they never get to run their course. (except star trek that lasts too long and babylon 5 that almost didn't make it. maybe now we can findly see the stuff that we never got to see casue the show ended.
  • Yes, that's why they used a ton of distinctly Egyptian and Mormon names like Andromeda and Cassiopeia.

  • Worse still, the moon didn't have a large "CHA" carved into the surface, back from when Chairface Chipendale tried to carve his name there using a laser powered by a flashlight. Happened sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, I think it was covered on CNN.

  • ...somehow he managed to smoke those huge cigars in that tiny cockpit. MY HERO. Why I have to go out into the garage if I want to smoke a cigar - any smaller, less airy space will leave me gagging. Women didn't seem to mind the smell on him either.
  • Space: 1999, good?!?! I'm sorry. I liked UFO, but with Space: 1999, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson didn't just hit rock bottom, they went a major part of the way to the earth's core. Cheesy Rudi Gernreich outfits; comptuer output on adding machine tape; acting not just wooden, but petrified (Al Gore would've been an improvement)...good grief. My favorite recollection of Space: 1999 stupidity was the episode where the head of the aliens that Moonbase Alpha approached that week told his or her subordinate, before having communicated with the humans, to destroy the humans' ships, using the name that the humans called them before having communicated with them!
  • I must confess to not remembering much of any of the plots of Buck Rogers episodes, but I remember Erin Gray, and your recollections of her are very much on target. Oh, yes... (The woman who played Princess Ardala was no slouch, either.)

    Re Battlestar Galactica: I have gratefully repressed all recollections of the show, save that I couldn't pass up buying a copy of the paperback The Tombs of Kobol, because I'd recently gone through the obligatory COBOL course in college and I wouldn't have minded seeing the tombs of COBOL at the time. (The custom among student assistants at the university computing center for those making it through the COBOL course was the COBOL Card Deck Burning Party.)

  • Or the silver-sprayed coathangers spinning around inside empty monitor casings like last time (cos they couldnt afford to employ a programmer who knew how to do 3d properly)?
  • Didn't Incubus name track ten on their "Make Yourself" album something similar Battlestar Galactica? It's amazing how far the influences go.
  • I hated it when they found earth because, of course it was modern day hollywood Earth they found. The whole previous premise of the show was that these people were the predecessors of us humans, hence their names were from our mythology. (Apollo & Adama = Adam).

    This notion (great for sci fi) was fueled by the Van Dannaken (sp?) idea of "Ancient Astronauts" But when they reached earth the became "'80s Astronauts" big deal!

  • Yup! (Score:1)

    by Lispy ( 136512 )
    cool site...These are the moments i like the web...
  • Someone else who remembers Quark! Ah, Richard Benjamin's early years ... Now, who else remembers that other sci-fi extravaganza, Salvage One ???

    Michael J.
  • What happened in Space:1999 was that the moon was being used as a vast nuclear waste dump, but a spacecraft ferrying loads into the dump crashed, this ignited the nuclear waste and drove the moon out of orbit.

    Nobody ever even attempted to explain how come if the moon was going so fast it could travel between solar systems in a week, that it could slow down enough in solar systems that the workhorse "Eagle" ships could go from the moon to a nearby planet and back again!

    Bad science! Very Bad Science Indeed!

    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • It's no secret, really. Glen A. Larson is Mormon. 'nuff said.
  • Scifi freaks who are also memebers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints [lds.org] think Galactica is kinda funny since a lot of their stuff is stolen from religious stories/practice. "Council of the Twelve" and other such likenesses. It's been speculated that one or more of the producers was Mormon.
  • That reminds me of this. [bonsaikitten.com]


  • I have been waiting many years for this. However, given the shear love and respect that Richard Hatch has for the original BG -- (and the fact that Galactica 1980 fell flat because it left out most originals) he should now be the Commander. You could also get away with Dirk (Starbuck) and Herbert (Boomer) in Col Tigh type roles...I mean if you look at how good BG was for the time...imagine the possibilities...And hell, even a bad SCI-FI series would be better than the rest of the drivel out their today.

  • Yeah it's funny how all the good shows die young...Even in todays world you see great shows get thrown by the wayside like dirty trash. Thank goodness for SCI-FI, USA, and other varied networks that at least have a little respect for the greatness of these shows.
  • Yea -- Its not a smart thing to cut off the whole original fan base AND at the same time try to compete in todays market. From what I hear -- the "new" players claim to not even have seen Richard's trailer....What a farse...
  • There's an unofficial fan site that's got TONS of pictures -- Erin Gray Unofficial FanSite [clik.to]
  • If a new Battlestar Galactica series is indeed made, I hope they pay homage to Eddie Seidel, Jr. [kobol.com], maybe by naming a Battlestar after him or something.

    Eddie was a teenage boy who was highly intelligent, very into science fiction, and generally depressed with life -- a description that could probably fit a lot of people here. Except that Eddie was way ahead of his time; he was so wrapped up in Battlestar Galactica and so unable to find anything else in life to relate to, that when the TV series was cancelled in 1979, Eddie committed suicide.

    I never knew the kid, but I've known how he felt, and my heart goes out to him and his family.

  • No, he is American. I couldn't find anything stating JM Straczynski's place of birth in a quick search, but you can easily find audio interviews in which he has a clearly American accent. (His name is obviously not British either, not that that means anything)

    Even if he was British, I would tend to think the important thing in determining what country a television show is from is the country for which it was produced. Babylon 5 was produced for American television, and that makes it an American series, regardless of who wrote it. If the BBC hired an American producer to make a series, I'd still call it a British show. But it doesn't matter, as JMS is an American anyway.
  • But boy oh boy, I tivo'ed a few episodes from that BBC Cable channel we've got now, and man does it stink up the joint. It was incredibly painful, enough that I had to vow never to watch it again, for fear of completely ruining fond childhood memories. Frankly, watching Battlestar Galactica reruns, bad as it was, is much less distressing.

    Like several other people have pointed out, I'm fairly certain Space: 1999 was an American series. And it stunk too.

    There are really only two series that were ever truly good Science Fiction, both American, and neither mentioned in your rant: Babylon 5 and The Twilight Zone. These are timeless classics that I will never be embarrassed to watch again. TZ is sort of a special case having no regular cast or plot, putting B5 in a class by itself. It is truly unique in all of television's history. It has what you seem to think British Sci-Fi offers: a focus on stories, dialog, and character development. The flashy special effects are just a bonus, the meat of this show was the stories that took FOUR YEARS to develop (the fifth season being really separate from the rest). No one else has done that to the extent B5 did. Maybe someday someone will, but I don't see anything on the horizon. Just more Star Trek and syndicated junk. (Some of which I'll watch and enjoy anyway, but for entirely different reasons.)

  • Of course I remember Salvage One. It starred fellow North Carolinian Andy Griffith and the ultimate object of fascination, a junkyard.
  • They got sued for (alleged) plagiarism by the Star Wars people. That was another reason why they decided to pack it in.
  • By Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, UFO, Terrahawks, Space Precinct and others). Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (husband and wife) were probably hired to appeal to American audiences. Fred Freiberger (writer of some of Star Trek's third season) was producer or something.

    Leonard Nimoy was also on Mission: Impossible. And there was one episode, apparently, with William Shatner as guest star. Maybe this means that episode had the two main characters from both Star Trek and Space: 1999.

    (BTW: I've heard rumours that Blake's 7 is making a comeback - with Gareth Thomas!)
  • The moon accidentally got detached from Earth's orbit and hurtled through space. Gerry Anderson said that this added a certain edge to the first series, because rather than intrepid space explorers, it was about people who never wanted to leave Earth's orbit and were not prepared for it.

    In this way it's a bit like ST: Voyager. And in other ways too, if you consider the acting and general gloominess.
  • UFO was way better than Space: 1999. The first episodes of UFO lead the ratings in both New York and LA. Then the ratings dipped momentarially, the networks panicked, and the second series of UFO was cancelled to produce Space: 1999 instead. Uurgh.
  • I think the best thing you can say for Galactica is that the brat and his mechanical dog make Wesley Crusher look bearable.

  • There was only one show of the last season that didn't suck: "The Last Flight of Starbuck".

    Stuck on a deserted planet, with only some destroyed Cylons for company... I think I cried at the end (gimme a break, I was like 12 at the time).

    As for the rest of the season, the messiah kid (forshadowing of Wesley Crusher), the invisibility schtick, the two guys as replacements of Starbuck and Apollo... bah!

    I also don't remember why the Glactica crew didn't just land and say "Honey, I'm home!" What was the reason for hiding?

  • If this gets made with Glen Larson's input and without Richard Hatch's (no, not the fat gay one, the fat one who played Apollo), it is going to suck like the original.

    If, on the other hand, they INCLUDE Richard Hatch's input, it will be the show it always could have been, and should have been.

    -
  • I think the ideal solution would be for Larson to executive produce it, and give Hatch creative control as the actual producer.

    This will never happen since they're pissed off at each other, which to my mind means it shouldn't be made at all.

    Either of them alone is going to screw it up.

    -
  • And remember, Battle Star Galatica had the distant descendants of the Aibo, the 'Dagit' (or daget, or dagat, whatever) a little robotic dog which performed on cue and made the appropriate whirring robotic noises.

    *Almost* as annoying as the Aibo

    -josh
  • I agree. But on the other hand, DeSantos has said he respects Hatch, and would like to see what he's put together. And Hatch is being very diplomatic about the whole thing so far. We'll have to see what happens.
    --
  • The trailer had Lorne Greene in them? He died back in '87!

    Yes, it did, and yes, he did. How he appeared in the trailer, then, should be easy enough to guess. (Hint: Hatch asked for and got Greene's family's permission.)

    Yes, that's right, stock footage--in this case, a "holographic recording" made with footage taken from the laserdisc of the original Galactica movie.

    Interestingly, Hatch suggests that it might be possible in his Galactica Second Coming for Adama to have left behind recordings of wisdom and advice to be played back at certain times--and that it might even include footage Greene didn't shoot. Hatch suggests that they might use the same magic of CGI and effects tricks that let dead celebrities appear in ads for soft drinks, and Hank Williams Jr. do a music video duet with Hank Williams Sr. of a sing Hank Sr. never played on-camera ("There's a Tear in My Beer," for those who care).

    Of course, this opens up a whole can of worms about who should decide who gets to use the dead likeness of who--but then, that can was opened a while ago already. And Hatch did set a good precedent of getting permission from the next of kin, at least . . .
    --

  • Oh, yes [tbcnet.com].

    ---------------------------------------------
  • I mean, its was an OK sci-fi show, but nothing spectacular other than the above average special effects for TV of the day.

    I wonder if they will acknowledge that horrible Galatica '80 show or whatever it was called, where they were running around on earth with flying motorcycles.... shudder.

    Of course, they ruined Buck Rodgers the same way when they went off into space and started looking for other earth civilations, brought in Hawk... why do they ruin perfectly good shows like that?
  • I was wondering too.

    So I looked...

    She was pretty cute [eringray.com]
  • It isn't just funny for Mormans, but for many Jews and Christians who take the "thievery" in stride.

    Of course, we don't need that today. We have Neon Genesis Evangelion...

  • Not to be confused with "Battlefield Earth", which was made by another cult, the "church" of scientology. Check out this web page [msu.edu] for more info on the mormon/BG connection. Check out this web page [xenu.net] for more info on the clams:
  • Hatch has been working his butt off to get the show back into the general conciousness, and now Larsen and Singer are going to capitalize on this, but haven't even talked to Hatch or plan to have old characters in the show.

    Not really the kind of thanks Hatch may have been expecting.... :-(

  • BTW (Score:2)

    by McVerne ( 38715 )
    The name is Erin Gray (with an a) not Erin Grey (with an e.)

    Also check out http://formen.ign.com/news/13410.html
  • Hatch tried to make a new BSG film a few years ago. He was in Luxembourg scouting locations, interviewing talent agencies, and lining up funding. But then it emerged he didn't hold all the rights to the film, and left a lot of people rather upset.

    He is a nice guy, but very "hollywood". I met him at a number of parties (Lux is only a couple of hours away by car, and can be a great place to party in you know the right people). He had everyone excited about shooting in Lux, where the tax credits and other government incentives attract a lot of film crews. He had a casting agency hire a bunch of people, including YT, for various parts in the film. His vision for a tightly integrated story arc with an eye toward scientific details had everyone impressed, and he had a sample script that seemed very well done. He clearly had put a lot of thought into the film over many years, since BSG pretty much defined his entire career. And he looks like he is pushing 55 or 60 now.

    Then he went back to Hollywood, and filming never happened. Some SFX company was hoping to sell him their warez, and had done up many minutes of rendered vipers and such. The casting agency was left with a large unpaid bill. Principal actors had left gaps in their schedules to accomodate shooting, and then had to scramble to find work.

    Since then, the whole film crowd in Lux has a bitter taste in the mouth about BSG, but it is fun to watch the various machinations as people fight over the right to remake a guaranteed nostalgic money maker. It does depend on who makes it, and whether they pay attention to all the fans input on what was loved, and what was hated. Hatch didn't have any kids, wesley crushers, toy robots, or stupid plot devices in his script.

    the AC
  • I sure hope it won't get to that but I have serious doubts about this. IMHO the 'original' series was quite nice (BBC did a re-run no to long ago) but it went from nice to completely bad (at least IMO) when they finally found earth. Allthough it wasn't all bad I seriously think that the program makers totally ran out of idea's and started the 'easy way'. For example; remember the episode where a cylon and some human robot (yuch) were going to capture a radio station to broadcast their position (aka; location of earth) to the Cylon fleet? The entire earth was at stake and what happens? 2 man get to save the earth, gimme a break...

    And it went from bad to even worse and then the whole serie stopped. Now I truly hope that these people won't do what so many did before them; making new episodes in which they use new techniques and the likes with old plots. Eventually we would then get another struggle against the cylons with the same old evil tactics used in the first series. In many cases the producers think that we won't remember it anyway because it was 'so long ago'.

    But what would be even worse is that this same ingredient is enough to kill of the entire series and legend. Now most of us remember Battlestar Galactica being some nice SF series which (IMO at least) started to suck in the end. The 1st run however was quite good. If this new serie would indeed suck most people would eventually remember Battlestar Galactica as a sucky SF series and would even call us crazy for liking it; "heck, if the serie is as shitty as that I can't even imagine what horror the first series must have been".

    Lets hope it won't come to that. Unfortunatly that is what happens most of the time... Remember the (IMHO great) SF series V? And the totally sucky 2nd series? If so you know exactly what I mean..

  • But Twiki, the piece of recycled aluminum who did lifelike impersonations of Gary Coleman, can't escape mention here as Aibo's lovechild.

    I'd like to see a shooting gallery where you can take potshots at Alf, Twiki, and that crappy baby plesiosaur on Land of the Lost. Any other lame puppet or suit sidekicks worth mentioning here?

  • Yes, basically the moon is blown out of orbit in 1999 by a huge explosion on the dark side. Off it whizzes thru space, taking with it Moonbase Alpha; and it encounters various stange alien series.

    It is a Gerry Anderson series. (of Thunderbirds fame) ALthough he is most famous for puppet based shows, like Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 etc. he also did do a number of series where he used live actors for the characters, and his puppet skillz for the special fx. UFO was my favorite.

    The science in Space:1999 is of course mad, mad I say, but hey, it's fun and had some interesting ideas. The COMLOCK devices they used were neat I always thought (basically they carried devices that were combined video phones, door passes, and i.d cards). And the Eagle spacecraft were excellent. Inspiration: I' off to DL some wallpaper of Eagle 1 I think.
  • Yeah your right. Galactica 1980 really blew. Two guys in street clothes on gay motorcycles. CMON! What happened to the Vipers! I just hope the new show has these things in it: New Vipers (Multiple variants, keep the tri engine for history....), Cylons (Especially the cool Gold ones every once in a while thrown in occasionally with the normal cannon fodder silver ones, Ultra cool cylon base ships, A Cool Galactica that can handle a cylon attack better (every other week the landing bay got hit and they had to land somewhere else). Oh well....I hope it's good!

  • More pros:

    1. A young Jane Seymour (yum).
    2. John Calicos' leer.
    3. Lloyd Bridges cigar.
    4. "Feldercarb!"
    5. Gold Cylons.
    6. The models (not bad for pre-CGI).

    More cons:

    1. Killing off Jane Seymour (damn).
    2. Seeing the same stupid Cylon figher that gets blown up 69 times in every dang episode.
    3. Dirk Benedict's smirk.
    4. The hair.
    5. Daggits.
  • What next - Supertrain [spudtv.com]?

    Battlestar Galactica really sucked. In the pilot (I think) the Earth is getting destroyed, the Galactica is the last hope, and the captain goes AWOL to look for his wife and kids.

    Still, the bridge was powered by Tektronix. The controls actually did things, which meant they had to teach the actors to run the thing.

  • I disagree. While the production values may not have been stellar, they certainly were up to the standards of the time, for a weekly network series. And sure, not all the episodes were great, but unless you're doing "The Prisoner" [scifi.com], where you focus on 17 episodes [retroweb.com], you're going to have some dogs.

    Consider this, though: I argue that the brilliance of SF is that it can address very volitile social issues, like racism, environmentalism, sexism, etc., and do so safely. People may dismiss a story about slavery, for example, but when you change the races to Gorthos enslaving Kangoids, you can tell the same story, and get the same message across. Those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's all clearly remember the fear of nuclear war, right? The most memorable episode for me was the one called "Experiment in Terra" [battlestarfanclub.com], where Apollo ends up on a suspiciously "earth-like" planet, and has to diffuse a nuclear confrontation between "The Eastern Alliance" and "The People's Nationalist Force". The allegories were clear, even to my 10 year-old brain. It was then that I learned the true power of Science Fiction, and officially became a nerd.

  • jumptheshark.com [jumptheshark.com] agrees with you. Galactica '80 is precisely when BSG 'jumped the shark'.

    Cool site, tells you when TV shows started to go downhill. (happy days started to suck right around the time fonz jumped a shark tank with his bike)

    ---

  • Battlestar Galactica was an ok show but the only thing that held any interest for me as a child was the Vipers. Those were the coolset space fighters around. I used to draw them all the time in school...

    But..., that piece of crap pales in comparison to the majesty that was Space 1999. I wish they would remake THAT show. I had nightmares for months about the episode where they came across a spaceship graveyard which had a tentacle monster that would pull you undernetath itself and then slide out a smoking, charred corpse. By your command indeed.

    I know it's off topic. Mod me down, I don't care but someone please remake Space 1999!

  • The SF channel started running repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man, and I actually found that it was still pretty cool. Yes, the "special effects" were cheesy and unrealistic, but the cold war plots were often very cool.

    Unfortunately, on the flip side, the last season episodes really sucked as much as I remembered. One word: Bigfoot. :)

    And say what you want about SMDM, but it had by far the coolest opening of any TV show ever: that pounding rhythm, gnarley crash landing, mechanical limbs being handed off, all the while the incredibly cool voiceover:

    "Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology to create the world's first bionic man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster!" da da DA daaaaa! DA da da da da DA DA DA DA...


    --

  • pros:

    70's space decor on every alien planet!

    cassiopia

    opening credits

    arrogant attitude ("you think you're enemy sucks", "well, you've never seen a battlestar")

    temporary employment for Randolph Mantooth


    cons:

    terrible science (the galactica ran outta gas and they came to a dead stop!)


    please help me add to the lists
  • So how come American S-F series on TV suck so much. Think about it, Battlestar Galactica, a lame Star Wars ripoff; Buck Rogers, with that annoyiing little Tweekie (bee-dee-bee, bee-de-de Buck), Logan's Run, one aging boomer's preoccupation with grey hair becomes a TV series, Space: Above and Beoynd was Melrose place, but lower quality even Quark, Insteller Garbageman was pretty lame. I won't even mention Star Trek and it's innumerable spinoffs, there's a modern low brow hydra if there ever was.

    I swear, if it wasn't for British imports like Dr. Who and Space 1999, there'd be no good S-F on TV at all. Perhaps it's because American S-F relies on flash, glitz and special effects, which plays well on the big screen, but for the telly, you need something smaller scaled, which relies on stories, dialog and character development, of which all of these things British literature surpasses American literature.

  • IIRC the woman who played Princess Ardala was also a costar on the 80's TV show "Matt Houston".

    Och! I managed to find her stats [imdb.com] on imdb.com. Yep her name is Pamela Hensley. She was in her early 30's at that time. I recall her being a pretty good actress. She was delightfully evil in Buck Rogers but was very caring/friendly in Matt Houston.

    It's too bad, it looks like her career pretty much ended after Matt Houston.

  • Could someone please explain the premise behind Space 1999? Like are they from earth? Is there some sort of earth empire or what not? Sorry, but I was a tiny tot at the time and I didn't have control of the remote...I do have some Space 1999 cards though.

    I'm not surprised that I didn't really get a chance to watch it since it was only on for like two years.

    As for its characters they do seem to have had Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. I do believe that they are married so that is probably good enough reason for them to be costarring in Mission Impossible as well as Space 1999.

    An interesting index of Space 1999 sites:

    www.space1999.net [space1999.net]

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Out of the old, into the new (Score:3)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Saturday February 24, 2001 @12:59PM (#405786)
    Why is it that in the late 90's early 00's, studios/entertainment/media companies can't come up with any new content?

    As opposed to all the "original" stuff that hack Shakespeare cranked out??? Retellings of histories and stories appropriated from old folk tales...

    Hell, people probably heard the Epic of Gilgamesh and were like "Another Hero Quest? Geez..."

  • In case ya don't know... (Score:3)

    by McVerne ( 38715 ) on Saturday February 24, 2001 @12:43PM (#405787) Homepage
    Erin Gray has a website at http://www.eringray.com

  • I hope it isn't as much of a failure this time (Score:3)

    by Heidi Wall ( 317302 ) on Saturday February 24, 2001 @12:47PM (#405788)
    When Battlestar Galactica came out in the late 70's it was tipped as the next huge SF sensation. It was produced as a kneejerk reaction to Star Trek showing on the other networks, but was only designed to be a couple of episodes at first. Unfortunately, half way through filing the studio bosses decided to greatly increase the length of the series and commissioned a whole load of extra episodes - without increasing the budget. The result was a bit of a mess, and BG was rightly panned by the critics at the time, and the audience viewing digures, although large for the first week, tailed off. In the end it was rescheduled to a different hour. It was one of the most expensive flops of the era.

    Many things about it were awful - hairstyles, acting, plot. The bad guys, in the form of the nefarious Silon, were among the worst in TV history, utterly laughably bad.

    This means that it now makes an excellent Sunday afternoons viewing. The discriminating fan of super cheesy 1970's SF series will not be dissappointed by a viewing of Battlestar Galactica. The touching scenes involving Jane Seymours death and her childs adoption of a furry proto-Aibo are particulary amusing. And the attempted and very forced insertion of Greek Mythology throughout the series is funny too.

    If you feel like going on a nostalgia trip, kobol.com [kobol.com] is an excellent site featuring a hell of a lot of BG nostalgia. More than I can handle, thats for sure.

    I just hope that this version isn't as bad as the last, though that should be easy.
    --
    Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,

  • Hatch is Still In the Running (Score:5)

    by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) on Saturday February 24, 2001 @06:38PM (#405789) Homepage Journal
    Richard Hatch is still trying, and still has hope. He has a brief trailer that he's made on credit cards and lunch money, and he shows it at conventions--he showed it at VisionCon [visioncon.net] here in Springfield, Missouri earlier this month, and also the previous year when he and Jack Stauffer were both con guests.

    I don't know about what happened in Luxembourg--I wish I'd heard about this pre-con, so I could have asked him about it--but the rights thing over Galactica is such a huge mess that, if it was more than a couple years ago, I'm not surprised, and I really wouldn't blame Richard for it. Apparently Glen Larsen discovering that he had some residual rights to some elements of (but not all of) the show via the episodes he wrote knocked the whole thing into a cocked hat, and nobody knew exactly who had what rights anymore. Hatch has been trying the best he can to get the whole thing ironed out, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this new wrinkle. One thing's for sure--Hatch's fans can swing a lot of letter-writing power. Call it a "snail-mail Slashdot effect." The Sci-Fi channel abruptly dropped their plans for a Galactica update last month--though I'll admit it might have been due partly to Singer's sudden interest in the franchise.

    As far as creative vision is concerned, Hatch is clearly no duffer. He's actually written--and I don't mean Shatnerly-ghost-written, I mean written--a trilogy taking Galactica into the future, and the storyline of that trilogy is roughly the way the new show would go.

    The trailer is really slick, with some great footage (albeit perhaps a bit of overacting), a special appearance by Lorne Greene, and CGI done by volunteers that looks incredibly polished. There's one shot of a Viper zooming through an open tunnel in one side of a starship and out the other that never failed to elicit gasps of awe from the audience. It's amazing how slick and polished it looks--you'd swear it was from a finished product. Hatch tells stories of screening it to studio execs who were sort of embarrassed going in, expecting to see someone's home video, and then had to pick their jaws up off the floor when it showed.

    There are some still frames from the trailer on the BattlestarGalactica.com [battlestargalactica.com] website, but due to SAG rules (having to do with the actors actually having to be paid and stuff), they can't put the whole thing online or otherwise make it available. So they screen it at cons.

    Hatch has always expressed a willingness to work with whoever got the rights--even Larsen, though Larson rebuffed him (and Larsen's involvement with the Singer version doesn't give me a whole lot of hope). Hatch can also swing most of the still-alive original cast--even the reclusive Dirk Benedict. All he wants is to ensure that the new series has the same things that kept people watching the old series--the original cast in their original roles. All the other proposed BSG projects have been planned to focus elsewhere--on other elements in the BSG universe. Hatch can understand that the studios might prefer to swap in new faces, but all he wants is that there should be a segueway from the old to the new, with more than lip service paid to the original. One of his great fears (and mine, too) is that they'll do a recast and remake, a la the Lost in Space movie that Bill Mumy lobbied for and was then shut out of.

    The problem with Hatch, as I imagine the "suits" in charge of studios see it, is that he's a starry-eyed dreamer, with a Vision. That so overshadows the other aspect of him--his business sense, and ability to make much out of limited resources--that it's no wonder the suits get scared. After all, other dreamers with creative vision in the past have made major holes in studio pocketbooks--just look at Kevin Costner.

    Still, the open letters and interviews posted to the BSG site lately do give me hope, especially the fandom.com interview [fandom.com] with DeSanto in which he says he respects and admires Hatch for keeping the fandom alive and would like to see his trailer. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

    (Another trailer Hatch showed at the con was his new project, The Great War of Magellan [greatwarofmagellan.com]. This one is also an unfinished teaser, but the storyline looks promising and it has quite a few interesting faces in it--Hatch, Jason Carter, Brad Dourif . . . have to wait and see what develops there, too.)
    --

  • Answers.... (Score:5)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Saturday February 24, 2001 @12:45PM (#405790)
    A) No.

    B) Oh, yes.

    TWW

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